I beg your indulgence for a post not about blood, but about another body studies topic, skin, and about how our associations with body parts reveal our formative cultural conditioning, even despite ourselves.

In a recent article at The Atlantic, Rebecca Golden writes movingly of her battle with her body weight disability and ponders the implications of surgically losing pounds of skin in Detroit. She considers the city’s roots in the fur trade, the money that came for skins, and the city that seems to have vanished with its factories and finds hope in the thought that losing the skin may just be another thing to get through, just like the collapse of Detroit manufacturing..

From my vantage point, there are two problems with her piece, two blind spots that need addressing, one concerning the present, one the past, that mark the piece as coming from an important personal place, but also from a place that side-steps some crucial problems.

Let’s see what Kid Rock has to do with any of this…(don’t worry, he’s only a by-note)